With Snowpipe’s serverless compute model, users can initiate any size load without managing a virtual warehouse. Instead, Snowflake provides and manages the compute resources, automatically growing or shrinking capacity based on the current Snowpipe load. Accounts are charged based on their actual compute resource usage; in contrast with customer-managed virtual warehouses, which consume credits when active, and may sit idle or be overutilized.

Snowflake tracks the resource consumption of loads for all pipes in an account, with per-second/per-core granularity, as Snowpipe actively queues and processes data files. Per-core refers to
the physical CPU cores in a compute server.

Note

Using a multi-threaded client application enables submitting data files in parallel, which initiates additional servers and loads the data in less time. However, the actual overall compute time required would be identical to using a single-threaded client application, just spread out over more internal Snowpipe servers.

The utilization recorded is then translated into familiar Snowflake credits, which are listed on the bill for your account.

Note

Snowpipe is currently a preview feature; however, accounts that try the service are still billed based on usage.